Posts by jake 26682 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Jun 2007
Note also that they said "more than" 5km ... I, personally, will be passing the ISS more than 5km away several times per day. Or, if you prefer, "a minimum distance of 5.4km" ... so about as close as Paddington is to The City[0][? Ohhh ... scary!
Propaganda. Or, in the words of the prophet, "smells like bullshit to me".
[0] As the crow flies, of course.
Certainly not! Even as a callow yoof, I knew that realistic fleshtones were infinitely irrational and somwhat chaotic in nature, and thus uncompressable if realism was intended in the final display. Instead, we compressed UUCP headers in usenet multi-part binaries. Saved entire kilobytes per picture in early testing. Shame it never caught on ...
Pardon me while I get back to restoring my original 1944 Quick Turbo-encabulator.
"I can still remember a very lubricated taste test in 1997 of MRE sachet food with best before date in 1968, manufactured date in 1963."
Must have been very lubricated indeed ... MREs didn't make their debut until 1980. Prior to that, the food was canned. Food packaged in 1963 would have been MCI ("Meal, Combat, Infantry, debut in 1958). The "Long Range Patrol" ration, available to the troops from 1968, was packetized, but was freeze-dried and required rehydration prior to sampling.
Difficult. It boots and runs from a single floppy, contains no HDD, and the display is a rather small LCD. Most early units are 286 based, with 640K RAM. Later models have a 386, 2 megs of RAM and an unused IDE controller and unused ISA expansion slot. They all have odd memory mapping because of the LCD display, a small built-in thermal printer, and proprietary hardware for the blood work itself. I have never tried to plug in a HDD or expansion card, no point.
I keep my Vet's blood machine running. It's an original Idexx Vettest 8008, and is about 30 years old. It's up-to-date, though ... it runs a 22ish year old version of FreeDOS, because MS-DOS is no longer supported. None of the Vets or vet-techs who have run a blood panel on the thing know (or care) that it runs DOS, much less that it's built on a rather elderly PC. It's a single-purpose device, and air-gapped, so security isn't an issue.
I know of about forty of these things still in use here in the SF Bay Area, because I have worked on them. I suspect there are several hundred more. (I bought a bunch of used units 23ish years ago from Vets with Y2K worries ... I was speculating on the need for spares in the future. It was a good guess on my part. I have since augmented my stock by purchasing them whenever I run across 'em.)
If you are reading this, you're probably using the hack that I put together in 4.1BSD (now called 4.1aBSD) for part of the TCP/IP stack to be included in 4.2BSD[0]. It was supposed to be one of those "Just get us through the demo, dammit!" hacks. I got 'er done over Christmas/NewYears break in 1981. Virtually every version of TCP/IP since has used it. Not too bad for a quick hack ...
[0] Just to cut the usual pack of idiots putting words into my mouth off at the socks, no, I didn't write the whole stack. That's why I said "part of". It is only about 120 lines of C in total.
"Soon Crypto-Nazis"
It already exists ... It describes someone who secretly agrees with (neo-)nazism .... or sometimes someone who obviously agrees but refuses to say so in as many words.
Likewise crypto-fascists. My Big Dic[0] suggests that the British Press used this term as early as the 1920s.
[0] OED, second dead tree edition.
I hear what you are saying, but the vast majority of people, even those who understand the conversation, would not consider the Dollar or Pound to be digital. Bitcoin, on the other hand, most definitely is in the minds of those very same people.
And it avoids overloading the word Crypto, while properly using the word Digital.
"MODEM has never been assumed to mean anything except a device for turning characters into a unique sequence of transmitted tones and for performing the reverse operation on a sequence of received tones,"
Wrong. "MODEM!" is also US-Southern shorthand for "May I please have another portion of biscuits[0] and sausage gravy?", often accompanied by appropriate gesticulation toward same.
We won't discus French Politics, this is off-topic enough as it is ...
[0] The savory quick-bread variation of biscuit, of course. Recommended.
To say nothing of the sloshing out under acceleration, braking, turning, hitting bumps/dips ... in fact, any movement at all will slosh out fuel.
Right on to your crotch ... with the excess dripping on any one of several ignition sources residing about a foot below.
Pretty much the definitive history of blinkinlights here.
Here's a plaintext address for those of you who quite sensibly refuse to simply click on links without having at least an inkling of where they might take you:
http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/B/blinkenlights.html
Note: The above link contains nazi symbolism in a historical context. Might not be safe for work in some jurisdictions.
I was just putting the finishing touches on a small cluster of vaxen at SLAC one fine Friday afternoon. The annual Big Game between Stanford & Berkeley was to be the following day. A couple of grad students started passing a football (American version) between themselves. In the glass room. Just as I was threatening mayhem if they didn't knock it off, the ball hit the Big Red Button. Needless to say, a bunch of pissed off people couldn't attend the game the following day. The grad students computer privileges were suspended for the rest of the academic year. Personally, I'd have hung them by the thumbs in the Quad as a warning ...
As an alum in good standing of both schools, all I can add to the above is "Go Bears!"
Now with WSL you might get an error dialog stating "lp0 on fire".
Ran across this around six years ago when trying to convince a very old bit of kit (IBM 1403) to cooperate with Linux. I jumped about a foot. It had been probably three decades since I had last seen that error message.
"These corporations would probably fork Linux in a whim"
If they could, they would have done so a long time ago[0]. But they know that if they do, they lose the free experienced help of several hundred thousand FOSS coders world-wide. Baby & bathwater.
[0] Some would say that they already partially have ... but that's another rant.
"this mostly seems to me that someone on the "core team" is behaving badly"
Probably just a simple personality conflict. The moderation "Team" tried to flex their muscles ("We're charged with enforcing the CoC, so we're more equal than you are!") and were called out ... and slunk off with their tail between their legs.
"it's just showboating & attention-whoring."
Has anyone ever joined a so-called "Team"[0] formed to ensure adherence to a CoC who isn't an attention whore and showboater?
Have any of the above ever been actually useful to the product being produced, or do they impede the progress of that project?
Gibe me one halfway decent BDFL over all these cross-purpose "Teams" any day of the week.
[0] If you can hear the capitol "T" when they are talking, keep well away for your sanity's sake. It's a sure sign that the bureaucracy has become more important than the project itself.
The first versions of Joy's vi weren't called vi (we called it "ex in visual mode" or "Bill's ex") until version 2, when it became vi ... These all ran fine on smaller PDP11s, at least until until version 3 (2.13 was the same thing as version 3, but without the enhancements[0] that were the cause of the major number change). The 3.0 release was big enough that it required overlay code (a version of paging) to run on the 16 bit machines. If you didn't have the overlay software (available from Version 7 with the 2BSD patches), or your machine was otherwise under powered, you happily ran 2.13. I still run a somewhat modified 2.13 on a couple of the older machines in my collection.
[0] This included debugging (trace?), the VAX/unix vfork system call, lisp hacks, ability to edit encrypted files, and a couple other bits & bobs that have slipped my mind. Seems to me that enabling debugging made it too large for any PDP11.
Since argumentum ab auctoritate seems to work in your world, I've been using UNIX since Septemberish 1974, with UNIX Version 5 at Berkeley, just before ken got there. I helped write the pile of code & patches that became 1BSD, and carried on contributing to BSD through 4.3-Reno, which brought BSD close to POSIX compliance. Note that POSIX did not even exist until 1988. So I think I can quite comfortably state that no, UNIX and POSIX are not the same thing.
And get this ... POSIX isn't even tied to UNIX. It is a series of standards designed to allow software portability between operating systems. Including Windows. Ever use Cygwin?
Yes, Peter, I know ... Linux isn't UNIX. Nor does it try to be. Neither does BSD anymore.
"Bollocks is it optional. It comes installed"
Slackware does not now, and currently has no plans to ever run the systemd-cancer. Seeing as Slackware is the oldest continuously maintained, and (arguably) the best Linux distribution available, your premise is clearly wrong.
"but there are instances where you are forced to use it"
"Forced"? Does that word mean what you think it means?
"because a particular piece of software or library requires it."
You might come close to convincing me if you can make a business case for one piece of software that requires it.
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